Should virtual assistant have a personality?

We all know that Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa seem to have a personality that humans can relate but is absent in Google’s virtual assistant.

According to Google,

This lack of charisma is deliberate, Google says. Incorporating highly scripted jokes into its assistant might boost the Google app’s charm, but it would give users a false impression of the program’s capabilities, Singhal says. “I’m not saying personality shouldn’t come, but the science to get that right doesn’t fully exist.”

I think I agree with Google on this. Unless you have cracked the science and technology behind the “emotional connections” in the AI world, it is important that we don’t give a false sense of hope or understanding to the users. It might help the company behind the service in the short term in terms of user adoption but there will be a disappointment for users in the future. As someone who advocates the importance of UX in everything we do on the technology side, giving false hope is a bad UX design. I am pretty sure Jeff Sussna will agree with me on this.